


the measures of our bond

by diogcnes



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Humor, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-12
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 12:46:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3529967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diogcnes/pseuds/diogcnes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock takes the fall, but their bond remains as strong as ever.</p><p>in which there’s a lot of questionable world building, John Watson goes batshit crazy, and Sherlock is consistently the most annoying flatmate in London.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the measures of our bond

**Author's Note:**

> The only person who has had the great misfortune to read this over is my sister. It's kind of funny, kind of sad. But mostly sad because I wrote it and my writing is sad.

John’s music began to write when he was about nine years old. It began with a crescendo, a cry for help in a local playground. His sister, Harriet, had written as a melodic and prided herself on being the most popular kid on their street. John, of course, being her little brother was expected to be reckless and irresponsible. And what better way to find out than to dare him to climb a large rock situated at the playground’s edge? Honestly, it makes you wonder what kids got up to before wifi and interactive robot dogs came along.

John was very small for his age and the oversized clothes his mother outfitted him in didn’t help that fact. So if you had to hazard a guess if he would be able to survive this without sustaining a very serious injury, the answer would be no. Even then, he had good sense to decline their challenge. 

But John was proud and Harriet’s friends were persuasive. 

In the same moment that John’s little body fell to the tough and unforgiving ground, not to move for the next nine minutes, his music began writing in the village hall. The concertmaster was pleased to tell his parents what he had written as, “A beautiful harmony! In the key of C! I can assure you, your little John is perfectly average.” John was fine, if not mildly concussed, and his parents spent more time being excited about his presentation than smothering him with concern.

And it was quite a shame too, since Harry was kind of counting on mandatory hospital ice cream. She got grounded, in the end. And that was John’s consolation. 

There had been a rumour going around town that John would take after his Great Aunt Elizabeth, who had written late. She went off-key several years later. 

Off-keys were outcasts in society, infinitely lost and indefinitely empty. Without their music playing in the halls, they walk around dazed, a faint memory of what they had once been. The loss of the music means the loss of everything. They ended up on the streets, peddling for food and money, never to return to society again. 

John’s first symphony was titled “Pain” which made sense because his adolescence was rife with it. Or at least thats what the conductors used to say. After Harry came out as a lesbian, their father became uncontrollable and John’s mother seriously considered severing their bond. For their wellbeing, they left the village and had their music transferred to Royal Music Hall in London. 

John loved the city. He lived and breathed London. 

His mother was able to find a steady job working as a secretary for a local GP. Harry found both acceptance and a calling, she worked as a volunteer for LLGS. John got himself an internship at Bart’s and left to fight for queen and country. And in the end, everything turned out alright.

::

Sherlock Holmes came from a long line of melodics. His father was a melodic and so was his father before him and so on and so forth. Boring. Mycroft had written as a melodic early on and Sherlock was expected to do the same. And even though he knew it was not likely, he secretly hoped he would write as a harmony. 

Like much of the gentry, his music was under close surveillance, held in a state of the art vault in the heart of their estate. They retained the same concertmaster that had looked after Holmes family symphonies for so long that Sherlock could not remember a time when he wasn’t cataloguing scores in the library or entertaining him with anecdotes about his family history. Reginald knew his job, and he knew it well. The Holmes’ never once thought about replacing him and Reginald never thought of retiring. It was the way it would always be in the Holmes’ family. And it would probably never change.

On Sherlock’s seventh birthday, the music began to write. “Right on schedule.” the concertmaster thought out loud. Holmes men always wrote on their seventh birthday and Sherlock would not be an exception. The cook celebrated his presentation with a small garden party. Sherlock was the only attendee. At least he was allowed to eat as many chocolate biscuits he wanted.

“I knew you would write as a melody, just like Father and I.” Mycroft said as a-matter-of-factly during one of the rare holidays he spent at the estate. Sherlock pretended not to hear him and turned his attention to moving his sprouts around on his plate. Their mother and father did not look up from their places from opposite sides of the table. Sherlock wished that they would speak up. He also wished for Mycroft to fall into a pit of acid but he decided not to voice this either. 

He had always wondered what it would be like to have his music play out in a music hall. He would only be able to visit his symphony in privacy, but to look upon the music of others! How exhilarating it would be to walk amongst hundreds of people without interacting with them at all. The very idea made him giddy with excitement. The scores were the lifeline of the population. No one could imagine living without them, without the steady downbeat guiding them through life, without the uplift of a crescendo. 

Their father died when Sherlock was nearing university age. Heart attack or something equally insignificant. Mr. Holmes was a shadow, someone who stood behind Sherlock in pictures and loomed over him at the dinner table. He had been knighted, but Sherlock could never remember what for. 

When his score played out at the wake, Sherlock internalized the soft vibratos and lilting decrescendos that was his father. It was painful to hear the last note cut off. Sherlock wanted the song to keep going, but he forced himself to believe that everything must end in its time. He thrust himself into his coursework, then his experiments, then the drugs. 

Mycroft got him the much needed help after lots of yelling and lots of bribing. Sober Sherlock was generally lauded as the worst Sherlock for a while. Then he decided to stop being sorry for himself and thank god for that because by then, half of London had been mixed up in one or two of his temper tantrums. 

Mycroft was very happy. Sherlock was secretly relieved but also very ticked off at Mycroft’s gleeful, almost smug, smiles. His solution to the problem involved a chunk of sodium and the goldfish tank Mycroft liked to keep in his office. And in the end, everything turned out alright.

::

Bonding. It was a very serious word. In ancient times. it was considered fate when your harmony matched with some poor soul’s melody. It was largely by accident, if anyone was going to be honest. No one was really someone’s destined, some people were born well suited to several songs and some people weren’t. Most bonds were platonic anyway. People no longer romanticized bonding, unless they wrote screenplays for some BBC period show. 

The smart thing to do was to go to a conductor, an expert on bonding and its relationship with someone’s fate. But people hardly ever do the smart thing. 

Sometimes bonds become hard to sustain. In earlier times, out of tune bonds were common, especially during adolescence. It was so simple to fall in sync with someone you spent quite a lot of time with. Modern scientists began toying with the idea of questioning the bonds and humanity’s susceptibility to fall into them, and soon a cure-all began to be administered to children. It was a horribly bitter pill, hard to swallow with an ashy aftertaste that never went away. 

In the army, the pill came with their daily rations. Spending so much time with people in life threatening situations was a perfect place to form a bond. With their added age, there was a greater chance of compatibility and to dissolve such bonds would be painful. 

A very young Sherlock Holmes promised himself that he would never go through that sort of pain. John Watson openly challenged that promise. Sherlock was utterly fucked from the very beginning, because this John Watson wasn’t even the bonding type. Or so he liked to say. 

This didn’t stop Sherlock from going through his medical history, which boiled down to a directory of London’s best conductors. John Watson’s fifth symphony had been in rest since Sherlock had taken the fall. John had been looking for a reason why ever since. Sherlock knew why. He had always known. 

“It’s a perfect day to catch a cold. Don’t you agree, John?” Sherlock said on a brisk November morning. John had worn his warmest sweater, a ghastly beige number that did nothing for his figure. John Watson looked up from his newspaper, “I guess.... Why would you want to catch a cold though?” 

Sherlock scoffed, “For science, of course.” 

“Right. Do you want me to come with?” John stood up from his chair. 

“No, that’s alright. I’ll be back in an hour. If not, something interesting happened.” Sherlock’s eyes lit up with the last sentence.

“You’re making me nervous.” Sherlock rolled his eyes, typical John. He went to the closet to fetch his coat. John’s eyes followed him, brow furrowing as the minutes progressed. 

“I’ll do better on my own, John.” he assured him with a tight lipped smile. 

“Last time you said that you jumped off of Bart’s.” 

Sherlock’s whole body instinctively tightened, “John.” It said much more than he wanted it to. 

John took a shaky breath and turned to look at him, “Sherlock. This could go one of three ways. One, you allow me to come with you. Easy, simple, the smart thing to do. Two, you put up a fight and end up leaving the flat without me. I wait a couple minutes and trail you for two blocks until you yell at me for being obvious and for bringing my gun. And three, I call Mycroft.” 

“You wouldn’t.”

“I think we both know, I would.”

Was he bluffing? 

“Fine. Come along.” Better not to tempt fate.

::

A few hours later, John Watson found himself stripping on the side of the road and jumping into the Thames to save the bloody idiot he called a flatmate. 

In the same instance he grabbed Sherlock’s waist, his fifth symphony began to play again, after three years of being in rest. It signified lots of things and some conductors could write pages upon pages of analysis about the meaning of that note or why this note was coupled. None of this meant anything to Sherlock. All that mattered was that John’s song continued. 

Mycroft always mentioned how problematic his reliance on John Watson was. The best way to get him to shut up is to mention his diet or the current international crisis or both. 

“Y- you utter arsehole.” John sputtered as Sherlock coughed uncontrollably on the sidewalk. Sherlock raised an eyebrow and opened his mouth to speak, only to be silenced with another coughing fit. “You planned this. So my symphony would keep playing? Major event. With someone who, sadly, is a big part of my life. And you knew, didn’t you? That my symphonies tend to end and begin with acts of stupidity.” 

“Heroism, John.” Sherlock coughed out. John stayed silent as he helped Sherlock up. 

“You know, my music started when I fell from trying to climb a stone in a playground. Harry laughed about it for ages. I know that she was scared. Hell, she was more scared than I was and I was the one who actually got hurt.” John said, “I was stupid. Young, yes. But also stupid.”

“No.” Sherlock took off his suit jacket, “You were brave.” 

“We’re still bonded, Sherlock. Having to hear your song at your funeral hurt and...God. I-” John’s breath caught. “The bond should have dissolved, platonic bonds are weaker than most. But it didn’t but I forced myself to believe that it was just me. When you came back, I thought it was because you weren’t actually dead. Because that would be the logical thing right? The smart thing? Oh christ. But still- Sherlock?”

Sherlock turned around to face John. Yes, assure him that you are listening. Sherlock smiled timidly. A smile flickered over John’s face when their eyes met but he quickly directed them back to the ground. 

“But then I wondered- I thought, maybe it’s not platonic.” his voice trailed off and John laughed. Embarrassed? Nervous? Onset of hypothermia? “Maybe-- maybe Sherlock Holmes is in love with me.”

Sherlock’s world collapsed around him.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments equal love and happiness. Any suggestions about this alternate universe and how to improve and expand it are so so welcome. Updates will be sporadic.


End file.
